Happy New Year!

Thanks to Shenmue fans everywhere, 2015 saw the start of Shenmue III. 2016 will be a year with noses to the grindstone to make the next installment of Shenmue worthy of the expectations you have entrusted with us. We would like to again ask you for your support and cooperation for all that lay ahead this year.

There are two announcements for the first update of 2016: poll results for the exclusive rewards on PayPal, and the homepage gets a face-lift.

Poll Results

The results are in for the poll posted in the final update of last year asking whether or not Kickstarter Exclusive Rewards should be made available for the Slacker Backer PayPal campaign.

The polling period lasted from December 24, 2015 to January 1, 2016. All Kickstarter Backers who pledged for a reward of $5 or more were eligible to vote. Of the 68,533 eligible Kickstarter Backers, there were 15,110 respondents.

The poll results are posted below. 4,670 of the respondents answered, “Yes, please make the Kickstarter Exclusive Rewards available on PayPal.” 4,009 respondents answered, “No, Kickstarter Exclusive Rewards are for Kickstarter only.” And 6,432 answered, “Either is fine with me.”

Considering the strong response from those of you who felt that the Exclusive Rewards should remain exclusive for the Kickstarter, those Exclusive Rewards will not be made available on the PayPal page as originally promised.

Thank you all for your participation. We hope everyone will continue to let their voices be heard as we go forward with the project.

Shenmue.link

The Shenmue III official website has undergone a renovation. The site has been updated as of January 4th. The Kickstarter Updates will continue to be posted here, along with Shenmue news and development progress reports.
The site can be accessed at https://shenmue.link/?en

Heyyo, tbh never commented before but meow? I dunno, to me it feels dirty to screw over PayPal slacker backers... hopefully they were able to get a refund if they felt offended by this decision...tbh I wish I could get a refund on this Kickstarter now. I don't want to be part of this anymore but oh well too late for me anyways.

@Jonathan The Kickstarter process was outsourced to a company that "specializes" in kickstarter campaigns, while possible that the people dealing with the actual merchandise (again may or may NOT be the same people that develop the game...you never can tell with big companies) thus had the final say in this poll regardless.

All I'm saying is this is likely just another case of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing (a typical phrase used on big campaigns and especially government organizations...). Let's say Company A develops the game (Yu Suzuki and associates), Company B manages the kickstarter and slackerbacker, THEN Company C manufactures the toys and products they give away... AND THEN you have Sony (likely has a hand in publishing) and Sega (actually owns the rights) all I'm saying is there's a LOT of hands this has to go through.

I had a hard time voting no on the poll.
But i did because i would not be a kickstarter exclusief reward and iwould undermine the exclusifity of the rewards.
I want the game to be the best it can. But if the paypal people dont want to pladge if they dont get the exclusif rewards the are the greedy ones.
They had plenty of time to pledge. I got a credit card just for this kickstarter.

I didn't even get a link to vote until after they were tallied up. What bothers me is that if more people wanted it and the people running it did whatever they wanted anyway, how can we trust the people making the game to listen to us on future polls if they already determined that they could not care less about our opinions?

@Blazing Hero: a good deal of the reward are offered to PayPal backers, yes. There are some other rewards besides those (such as the I AM SHENMUE 3 and the CHIBI YOU CAPSULE TOY rewards) at are not, however. This is fine and dandy. My point was that two of those 'kickstarter exclusives' (physical copy, toy capsules) are already available via PayPal, so why not allow the S3 World Telecom and Dreams Come True rewards as well?

I want as many people as possible to experience as much of Shenmue 3 as possible, and I want YsNet to get as much money as possible to make the best game possible.

I know it really doesn't need to be repeated, but some of these illogical comments are driving me crazy. 27% is not a strong not a strong "No" - sure, the update misstated that point. More importantly, 31% is not a strong "Yes", which is why the decision was made as it was. No, this is not a democracy. This was an opinion poll - a courtesy. The decision made based off it came with a myriad of legal and business consequences - the individual poll takers' stakes in which were minimal. I would venture to guess that the correct business decision was made based off all the available data, even though we are not privy to all the legal and financial details that went into that decision.

So you decided to have a poll to see if Kickstarter exclusive rewards should be made available on Paypal. Then went with the group that came in dead last with the smallest number of votes? Bizarre. Not sure why you bothered having the poll in the first place.

None of the other rewards are labelled as being kickstarter exclusive. The PS4 physical copy IS available on PayPal, with a PayPal slacker backer exclusive case. And the $120 and $500 toy capsule rewards are also available on PayPal, albeit in apparently a slightly different form. The only kickstarter exclusives NOT available on PayPal are the Save Shenmue Digital Upgrade, the S3 World Telecom and the Dreams Come True rewards.

I understand there is a strong feeling by YU and team to protect those that donated during the kickstarter and made shenmue 3 a reality . However I could only afford 120 dollar pledge and I had to borrow that until next payday during kickstarter. However in march I will be getting the 500 dollar reward though PayPal. I honestly don't care if others have the chance to get kickstarter exclusives outside of kickstarter because all I care about is the funding going up so we can all have a better game. Seems the majority want them made available. We as a collective really wanna see shenmue get to 11 million dollars

The thing with this poll is... the vast majority doesn't care so there will be no harm in including the extras to Paypal backers. From the small part of those who actually care about this matter the majority wants Paypal backers to get the extras too. So Awesome Japan siding with the minority who is against it shows EVERY other backer regardless of their votes that their voices are not respected by them. Even more they are taunted by declaring the minority a "strong response". This is not only a lost in potential sales but even more in trust. Why should people bother to participate in future polls if their opinion is rigorously ignored anyway?. This is yet another unparalleled marketing fail from Awesome Japan and once again shows their incompetence in handling the Shenmue franchise.

After 15 years of constant struggling, we managed to make the game a reality. The game should be the best experience for everyone. Nobody should want other people to be kept out of a certain gameplay feature. Share the love, that's what Shenmue is about.

You can't be true to Shenmue spirit if you don't want to share it with the rest of the fans. Pre-order exclusives may be common nowadays, but they belong to other franchises, not this one. Shenmue was kept alive solely by our love all those years. We should share this love, not keep it exclusive to certain people.

Shenmue needs to be as good an experience as it gets for EVERYONE, if we want it to be succesfull and see Shenmue 4 & 5 sometime on the future. And rest assured, if Yu had all the badget he wanted, the game would be the same masterpiece for every player, no matter if he had backed it or not. It's sellfish for us to wish otherwise.

When I read this section, it looks like everyone wants me to feel bad but my point:
- I backed a Kickstarter campaign at a certain level
- with this, several reward were promised
- Kickstarter exclusivity is part of this and as its own value.

For me, removing exclusivity is like you removed part of the reward you promised. I don't think it is a good idea to change the reward after the project is backed.
I can understand if there is some issue during the development, so everything cannot be fulfilled as expected. But this is not the case here.

The biggest problem is that now you have video game outlets false reporting on what actually happened. Why is it that anything associated with this community always turns to crap?

I wish the poll had never been created and that early backers got their perks and then additional separate perks were made for paypal slacker backers (which they did) WITH NO MENTION of possibly giving everyone the option later. Would have solved everything.

" Considering the strong response from those of you who felt that the Exclusive Rewards should remain exclusive for the Kickstarter, those Exclusive Rewards will not be made available on the PayPal page as originally promised." That is so fucking silly. Majority wins... RE-VOTE

As someone who backed at a fairly high level, I didn't even realize a poll was going on and even if I had - it was running between Christmas and New Years, when a lot of people are on holiday vacation. I think that the statistic you collected is too small of a sample size and that most of the "I don't care" votes would have voted yes if pressed to give an answer one way or another.

In the end - even though the voting majority margin feels slim - I think it's disheartening that you're still siding with the "No" votes instead of the "Yes" votes. I know that the normal backer rewards haven't changed but still - this is casting a negative light on Shenmue III and its future success. You should have followed what the poll reflected - that a majority (even a slim majority) said that "YES" the PayPal backers should have gotten the added rewards from Kickstarter.

I'd like to see a new poll get run - with a longer polling time. People probably weren't even AWARE that a poll like this was going on. (Especially if it was hidden in a Backer Update email right before Christmas.)

I agree with Dan Asenlund about the earlier 'who do you want to see more of in Shenmue 3?' questionnaire. The question asked one thing, the header for the question asked another.

Here is the response I've gotten from Awesome Japan/YsNet on this latest poll:

Hello Tom,

Thank you very much for your message. We understand that there is a lot of disappointment among fans who wanted the Kickstarter exclusives to be made available.

Since the launch of the Paypal campaign we have received numerous requests to remove exclusivity from certain Kickstarter rewards and make them available for the Slacker Backer campaign as well.

We held the poll as a method to gain more accurate insight on backer opinions concerning this matter since we could not be sure that the requests we received represented the opinion of the vast majority of the backers.

The poll was intended to gauge whether the backers felt that an exception could be made considering that the promise of exclusivity was already established. We felt that upholding this promise should be our foremost consideration.

The majority of respondents did not feel strongly enough about exclusivity to vote either yes or no. While the votes in favor of removing exclusivity marginally outnumbered those against, they did not represent a majority opinion in the poll.
The poll numbers do show that there are also many backers who do not wish to give up their exclusive rewards.

We feel that the logical conclusion to these results is to leave exclusivity as it is because there was not enough support to justify making an exception to go back on our original promise.

We are very happy that so many people responded and we hope we can continue to count on the support of the community.

Zeil999: Disagree. I'm sure a fair part of the people who voted "either is fine" would have voted yes rather than no if they had to make a choice (see my previous comment). If they truly didn't care, why did they even vote in the first place? The only way to find out is to have a revote with only a yes and a no option. Because the bottom line here is that the C option didn't make any sense whatsoever (as I and many others have already stressed below), but again so didn't the the decision to have Ryo (!) on the list of characters we want to see more of in Shenmue III (and on top of it give it the headline "Who's your favorite character in Shenmue?". Dough!

Can't say I really understand how having a majority of mboth yes make the rewards accessible and I don't care, can make it that the rewards are not available to "slacker backers" via Paypal.

I honestly don't care if a "few" more people get those rewards itf it helps makes the game even better, that really is the only point that interest me. And I really believe ultimately every one who backed this game no matter their position on tis poll wants the best game.

So how do 4600 votes get's beaten by 4000 I really don't get why you did a poll if you don't don't follow the result of this poll.

I generally don't understand what happened.... I mean clearly the larger number of votes went for making the exclusives available, and either options are fine ..... doesn't that mean majority vote went for including exclusives on Paypal ? .... or was there a rule that if a certain percentage decided not to then the decision becomes so ....

I voted yes on the survey. I got the calling card, among other items. I just don't understand why anyone would vote no. Making KS exclusive rewards available on pay pal, even for a short time, would only benefit the campaign for an even better Shenmue 3! Give the people who were unable to contribute on KS for one reason or another, a chance to get the exclusives. I recall during KS that several people mentioned their desire for certain exclusives, but were only able to use pay pal...Why not open these exclusives on pay pal for a certain amount of time to give those folks a chance?

To all those calling the NO voters greedy and selfish, think of it this way. There was a clearly defined date for the Kickstarter and a clearly defined set of KS exclusive rewards. I had to go out of my way to be able to back it for the tier I wanted, as I'm guessing others have with the limited time available.

Now I can see why people would vote no, as they made the effort to go out of their way to back the KS exclusive rewards. The people who didn't back the KS are at fault, they had the option to back it with the KS exclusive rewards and chose not to.

Demanding the KS exclusive items for something they passed up on before, now that IS being greedy, they had the chance but didn't take it. I don't see any fault to the 'no' voters, they were told KS exclusive, they made sure to back it within the deadline, so if they wanna say 'no', then that is their right to.

Kinda interesting this poll was only up right before Christmas and ended on New Year's.... I had no clue about this poll because those days I'm barely near the computer / phone and spending time with my family. Why such a short gap for a very important poll question?

Wow, as a backer, I'm disappointed in the backers as a whole that they would be this selfish given the situation, and I think it only hurts additional funding opportunities from the community.

Shame on those who voted no, and shame on the staff for not taking the 3rd option into the consideration, which clearly shows that most people could care less one way or the other.

Actually, it's a shame this was even put to a vote. Of course people donating to development through Paypal should get the same benefits as the original 30 day backers. Those people clearly have the same desire for the game and to enjoy the experience this offers, but are being punished for not falling in some obligatory 30 day window.

No. I completely understand what you're trying to say. What I'm saying is that your logic is flawed. A vote for either is literally a neutral vote. So those votes are pointless in the grand scheme of things. It means they don't care if it's no or yes, leaving it up to the discretion of Ys Net. Ask a person who voted either is fine about the decision and see what they say. If they are upset with the decision, then they flat out voted wrong.

This really upset people? lol Yes I also voted that I don't really care, I'm not gonna get upset or happy over either decisions since I have already secured a copy of what I want. I don't know anyone else that would have wanted something either. They all got what they wanted as well.

Well at least they let us vote. I guess that's fair. I'm probably NOT gonna vote about this again. People who said no are just gonna have to live with it if this goes through just as the yes voters are gonna have to live with it if it doesn't. We don't need to be little special snowflakes here just because we were here in time to buy what we wanted.

I don't think you get what I'm saying. Well, here's another scenario. Let's say the vote is whether to legalize pot or not. You have a "Yes" option, a "No" option and a "I'd be fine either way". The third option clearly weighs more toward a "Yes" than a "No" since pot at that time isn't legal. Are you with me? So the third option shouldn't have been there in the first place. It's just confusing. What I'm suggesting is a revote without that option. Now, I personally have no interest in the Kickstarter rewards but I feel really bad for the people that do because of the way this poll was conducted. Flabbergasted, to be honest.

Lol it's funny reading a few of the comments, but the kickstarter lasted long enough for anyone to donate money, even if they were only able to give 5 dollars at the time. Plus we're going to have the option to upgrade our pledges in the future, so it's not like everyone didn't get the chance to get in on the Kickstarter rewards while they were available. Like someone said before, just give different rewards for the Paypal backers, I mean what everyone wants more than anything else is for Shenmue 3 to get made, and that's the REAL reward for us all. So you guys made the right choice in my opinion, so keep up the good work and thanks for the update. :)